The second paper I will ask you to read concerns requirements analysis and specification:
Jackson, M. 1995. The world and the machine. In Proceedings of the 17th international Conference on Software Engineering (Seattle, Washington, United States, April 24 - 28, 1995). ICSE '95. ACM, New York, NY, 283-292. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/225014.225041
This is among the most lucid accounts I know of what it means to write a specification. The writing is light-hearted (the paragraph about steering mechanisms for cars busts me up laughing), but it's a very serious and deep consideration of the topic ... it's worth reading more than once, and thinking carefully about.
The paper accompanied an invited (keynote) talk at the International Conference on Software Engineering. Two years later, Jackson and Zave published a journal paper which encompasses some of the same material. If you like this paper, you might (at your option) follow on with:
Zave, P. and Jackson, M. 1997. Four dark corners of requirements engineering. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 6, 1 (Jan. 1997), 1-30. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/237432.237434
Showing posts with label readings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label readings. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Reading: Herbsleb & Grinter
Please read this week:
Herbsleb, J. D. and Grinter, R. E. 1999. Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway's law revisited. In Proceedings of the 21st international Conference on Software Engineering (Los Angeles, California, United States, May 16 - 22, 1999). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 85-95.
There are a couple reasons for reading this paper. For one, I want you to understand Conway's law (the relation between the structure of a software system and the structure of the organization that creates it), and in general the way technical issues in software design are tangled up with social and management issues. In addition, as software development is increasingly global, the cultural and communication issues discussed in this paper will become more and more important.
You should be able to download the paper from the ACM server, using the link above, when you are connected through the University. Let me know if you have problems with that.
Herbsleb, J. D. and Grinter, R. E. 1999. Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway's law revisited. In Proceedings of the 21st international Conference on Software Engineering (Los Angeles, California, United States, May 16 - 22, 1999). International Conference on Software Engineering. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 85-95.
There are a couple reasons for reading this paper. For one, I want you to understand Conway's law (the relation between the structure of a software system and the structure of the organization that creates it), and in general the way technical issues in software design are tangled up with social and management issues. In addition, as software development is increasingly global, the cultural and communication issues discussed in this paper will become more and more important.
You should be able to download the paper from the ACM server, using the link above, when you are connected through the University. Let me know if you have problems with that.
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